The spray-tanned con artist, who resigned this week as head of the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of (Artificially) Colored People, is the inevitable outcome of academia’s cult of manufactured victimhood.

College campuses have been grooming a cadre of professional minority fakers and fraudsters for decades.

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The pressure to conform and cash in on the cult of oppression chic is even more virulent among the student body. Race-based affirmative action is a primary catalyst.Read the rest of this entry »

Gun-rights groups Thursday slammed President Barack Obama’s call for a national reckoning on gun violence after the fatal shooting of nine people in a South Carolina church Wednesday night and his remark that “this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.”

“Does this man watch the news?” Dave Dalton, founder of the American Gun Owners Alliance (AMGOA), exclaimed to Newsmax before ticking off several mass shootings in recent months. “We had the shooting in Canada not that long ago. You had the one in Sweden. You had knife-and-machete attacks in the UK and other countries.

“You know this stuff happens,” Dalton said.

“Just hours after the tragic shooting in a South Carolina church, President Barack Obama resumed his fanatical war on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding gun owners,” said Erich Pratt, spokesman for the Gun Owners of America.Read the rest of this entry »

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Texas cannot be required to allow the Confederate flag on car license plates.

The case dealt with how much control state governments can exert over slogans and messages on vehicle license plates.

In the 5-4 ruling, the court said “just as Texas cannot require (Sons of Confederate Veterans) to convey ‘the state’s ideological message . . . (the Sons of Confederate Veterans) cannot force Texas to include a Confederate battle flag on its specialty license plates.”

The case came from Texas, where a state agency refused five years ago to approve a specialty plate requested by a group called the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The design was to include the group’s logo–a square confederate battle flag surrounded by the words, “Sons of Confederate Veterans 1896.”

After hearing public comments on the proposal, the state motor vehicle authority rejected the request, explaining that “many members of the general public find the design offensive,” and associate the flag “with organizations advocating expressions of hate.”

The Sons of Confederate Veterans sued, and a federal appeals court ruled that license plate messages, other than official mottos such as “Lone Star State,” are free speech and cannot be restricted by the state even if some residents consider the words offensive.

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In the Texas case, the appeals court said the legal test is whether a reasonable observer would understand the message to be an expression of government or private speech.

The Texas Governor, Greg Abbott, filed court papers as state attorney general urging the court to rule in favor of the state and against the confederate group.

As part of its final research push before finalizing its 2020 wording, test-census forms will be sent to 1.2 million households later this fall in without any references to “race” or “origin.” Instead, the forms will ask: “Which categories describe person 1?” Respondents will then be able to choose from the usual list of racial and ethnic categories.

According to Pew, Census officials want to be clearer with their questions so that officials can gather more accurate data as required by law. Past testing and focus-group research has indicated confusion among found that the terms “race,” “ethnicity” and “origin” can mislead or confuse respondents, they can mean different things depending on the person answering.

“We recognize that race and ethnicity are not quantifiable values. Rather, identity is a complex mix of one’s family and social environment, historical or socio-political constructs, personal experience, context, and many other immeasurable factors,” the Census Bureau noted in a 2013 report on past testing efforts in the 2010 census. The report also recommended continued research on optimizing the use of examples for each racial and ethnic category, among other strategies.

Census forms currently contain two questions related to race and Hispanic origin, with one asking Americans whether they are Hispanic, Latino or Spanish, and the other asking “What is this person’s race?” with checkboxes and spaces to write in answers.

The Bureau is also testing the use of a “Middle Eastern or North African” category within the current lineup.

Jeb Bush got the “slow jam” treatment from Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show” on Tuesday night, and he reiterated in rhyme that he was finally ready to hit the campaign trail and have “spirited debates” with his fellow Republicans about how to solve America’s problems.

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“While we’re talking about the issues, where do you stand on immigration?” Mr. Fallon, host of the “Tonight Show,” asked.

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“We are a nation of immigrants, and I believe everyone should have the chance to achieve the American dream,” Mr. Bush said over the music, before offering the Spanish translation. “Somos una nación de inmigrantes, y creo que todo el mundo debería tener la oportunidad de alcanzar el sueño americano.”

For decades, liberals have bullied Republicans into taking suicidal positions by warning that the country will wreak a terrible vengeance on them if they do not urgently accede to some liberal agenda item. The demanded policy is invariably one that the white working class either is indifferent to or actively detests.

Over the years, the GOP has been obsessed with winning more votes from some generally Democratic constituencies: perpetually alarmed women (gun control), the media (campaign finance reform) and feminists (Equal Rights Amendment).

It never works. Democrats must be astonished at their good luck that Republicans fall for it every time.

Today, Republicans have again decided their path to victory is to concentrate on winning slightly more of another Democratic constituency: Hispanics. Curiously, Democrats never follow their own advice. They don’t neurotically fixate on increasing their support from evangelicals, coal miners, pro-lifers or small-business owners.

Texas and California are trying to reform legal migration on their own. The politics in these two states couldn’t be more different, but legislators in both states recently proposed running their own guest-worker visa programs to get around the federal immigration reform gridlock. Relying on states to create their own migration systems may well be the solution to America’s immigration woes.

One-size-fits-all national immigration laws aren’t working. Federal reform efforts have repeatedly failed, so why not let states take a crack at it? States experiment with education, welfare and drug policies–immigration should be next.

A state-based guest-worker visa seems like a radical idea because immigration rules generally fall under federal jurisdiction in the United States. However, Canada and Australia–which like the U.S. are continent-spanning, economically diverse countries with traditions of federalism–each have such programs.

Corporate lobbyists have convinced legislators of both parties that America needs more guest workers in high-tech jobs. Leading the charge in Congress to do their bidding is Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, who has introduced legislation to double or triple the number of non-immigrant tech workers who can be hired annually on H-1B visas. But his proposal won’t fix the H-1B program’s flaws, which allow American and foreign workers alike to be exploited and underpaid.

{snip} The reality is that employers aren’t required to search for or offer jobs to U.S. workers first, and the H-1B program has been used repeatedly by corporations to fire and replace skilled and educated U.S. workers with cheaper, indentured, temporary foreign workers. This is done to increase corporate profits, but it’s at the expense of the livelihoods of thousands of American workers.